Sanjay Siddhanti

I wrote a post about deploying Python web apps on Lambda. It includes practical guidance on how to migrate a DB, serve static files, store secrets, and use Docker. Captures my experience learning serverless architectures and initially being disoriented. @sanjay.siddhanti/serverless-web-apps-in-python-4efa9754c513?source=friends_link&sk=1ee3b57fd6c165dd34d1a57f8be4b8a9" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@sanjay.siddha…

As someone who hates making slides, Claude has been a game changer. I've tried a few tools but this is the first one that's saving me a lot of time. What's working for me recently: - Claude Chat to research my Slack and Google Docs and iterate on the talking points - Claude Powerpoint plugin to build the slides. I find it works *much* better when I give it a skeleton deck with the right fonts / colors already baked in - Upload back to Google slides when done Uploading back and forth to Google Slides is annoying, but it works so much better than the Gemini integration in Google Slides right now, so it's worth the friction

@julesyoo @vinaysethmohta Amazing! I bet you can do it at higher quality too. I used to deal with so many entity resolution issues (is Dr. J Smith the same as James Smith, MD?) that are way easier with LLMs now

joked with my old cofounder about using the next 90 days to vibe replicate all the products and data tools that took us 3 years to build at our startup... I think i'll be done in 7. next up: AI agents to help hospital IT teams get thru every task that sits ahead of my ticket to grant me access to their Epic scheduling APIs...

Spent the day at the Pragmatic Summit in SF hosted by @GergelyOrosz . We're seeing a fundamental change in what it means to be an engineer and how we build teams. Here are a few of my takeaways: 1. Generalists > specialists Everyone has read Karpathy's post on hiring for agency. In product development, that's a full stack generalist who can use AI tools effectively. PMs and designers should be building prototypes and shipping code, not writing PRDs and mocks. People who love the craft of writing code by hand need to adapt rapidly and refocus on the increased business impact they can now deliver. 2. Smaller, flatter teams The traditional "two pizza team" concept needs to shrink. We are seeing more 1-3 person teams that can move faster due to less overhead. Teams should push more ownership to the engineers; having a manager in the loop on every decision will slow down velocity. 3. Single player -> multi player Most of us have had our "Claude code moment" and have achieved immense productivity improvements for solo or greenfield work. Now we need to scale that across multiplayer, multi-repo projects. The frontier labs have a head start which we can learn from. First, teams need to expose the agents to critical context that often lives elsewhere (design docs, product requirements, etc). Second, teams should invest in shared repositories of skills, tools, and workflows that every developer can benefit from. Find the early adopters and codify their workflow into something that everyone else can use. 4. Execs should do IC work again More than ever, leaders and execs need to ship code again. We all use our experience as builders (often many years ago) to gut check technical approach, output, and velocity. Those mental models need to be rebuilt in today's world. Fortunately, it's never been easier to get back into writing code and everybody should be doing it.

Ashby feature request: expose an MCP server so customers can talk to an LLM about pipeline strength, candidate feedback, speed to offer, etc. I'm hiring for 20+ roles and this capability could replace multiple meetings at my company. Seems like a great opportunity for building something "your CTO will use" 🙂 Your support team told me that API keys cannot be scoped to specific roles, so I can't let an EM pull data without giving them access to all roles at the company. @benjaminencz is this on your roadmap? Happy to provide feedback if so!

@nikil Interesting! Were these high profile individuals with lots of info on the internet? I tried this for a batch of new hires at work. Asked for summary of work experience and education. I don’t have Cowork access yet but Claude and GPT performed poorly. Gemini slightly better.

Results from first test of Claude Cowork Task: do research on 40 dinner guests - ChatGPT: found 10, "couldn't find" rest - Claude: found 18, guesses on most others - Cowork: found all 40 Big advantage of Claude Code / Cowork - can do long running complex tasks. Have seen chat limit to 8-10 lookups per request before - ex: researching attendees at a private work event. Cowork even poppedup a chrome window 20 minutes later to research a guest (I was on a call and had forgotten it was still researching). Makes sense that Claude limits model compute for regular users - seems like they could give more compute for Max users. After onboarding my parents to Claude Code last week, excited to see this much smoother path for agentic computer automation! Well done 👏 @claudeai @felixrieseberg!

@ankurnagpal Any advice on how to implement direct indexing without a bunch of maintenance? For me a benefit of buying an ETF is I can set it and forget it.

2 - Direct Indexing Instead of buying a single ETF or index fund to index the stock market, consider "direct indexing" where you buy every single company individually This generates more tax losses to harvest (up to 40% of your investment) & can offset other capital gains

No one in America pays a higher tax rate than regular employees with a high W-2 salary You make a lot of money but aren't rich enough to own a lot of assets Here are 9 things you can do to pay less in taxes before the end of the year:

@clairevo Thanks for writing this up! I'm curious about the format of the huddles. Are you sharing screen? Is everyone just doing their own work? etc.

5. Open org huddles I’m now sponsoring near daily “hangs” with the team where I just post up in a Slack huddle and do the real work referenced before, but the huddle has an org-wide open door. They usually last 60-90 mins and have about 10 ppl that join. These are my FAVORITE.

I cancelled 80% of my reoccurring 1:1s and I don’t think I’m ever going back. I’ve replaced them with these 5 things that are 10x more effective.

@pitdesi @_laurenmessner Where do you get them in SF?

It’s that time of year! Alphonso mangoes are in season. Customs restrictions, transport costs, & short shelf life make them tough to get in the US. Call your Indian store to see if they can get you some. They sell out within hours of arriving from the plane, are worth it!

@erikrtn @Armieey Great posts! No attribution needed :)

@Suhail Thanks! How do you evaluate the soft skills?

@siddhantis I no longer technically evaluate because my team tends to index on that more. I exclusively focus on the other half. I'd rather someone be 20% less technically skilled but 50% better on soft skills.

I think I’ve done 2,000 interviews. I've seen things. AMA

So awesome to see the next generation of engineers and data scientists in @akasahealth swag!

@DRMacIver I liked Waking Up with Sam Harris better than headspace

My default for this will be to just try Headspace but I figure many of you will have opinions on this subject and I might as well find out what they are.

Anyone want to recommend me some meditation resources? I'm particularly interested in guided meditations that are good for nonspecific (i.e. without an obvious target or cause) anxiety.

It was so fun to go back to my high school and visit the AP CS classes! @kickrg was a huge positive influence in my life and his classes led me to start thinking about studying CS and becoming a software engineer

@kickrg Such great times!!

#ThrowbackThursday #TBT Outstanding student athletes! #WillDuncanCarnegieMellonDuke #SanjaySiddhantiStanford #AndrewLeeDuke #NPHSLegends @siddhantis

@zachperret Agree weekly may be too often, but it's also too easy to forget about career growth and other important-but-not-urgent conversations if you rely only on ad-hoc pings If done right, you can also get valuable feedback that people aren't comfortable sharing in group meetings

This chart really is stunning ...

@vintweeta @akasahealth I still remember working with you at the 2015 Flatiron Hackathon! That was an awesome learning experience for me.

"A hackathon is the perfect time to try out a risky project with no cost of failure." Also can be a smart PM's secret weapon in generating buy-in for a cool idea 🥷 Great blog post @siddhantis @akasahealth on the culture and value of regular hackathons! akasa.com/blog/akasahack…